I have developed a routine for CnW Recovery that will hopefully solve your problem. (www.cnwrecovery.com)

It is largely designed for memory chips though it does work on hard drives - though it may be a bit slow, depending on the size of your disk, and the number of AVCHD (.mts) files you have.

The program works by scanning the complete disk for any AVCHD clusters. It then intelligently joins them together creating long runs of logically correct video. Many other recovery programs just produce short clips that may number in the thousands. The CnW development hopefully overcomes most of these problems.

AVCHD files are not dated internally and so your requirment to find just recent ones is probably not possible

The free demo will indicate what can be recovered, and the log will show file sizes. If then happy you can purchase a licence starting $19.99